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| Down Under |
| Australian Faces New Trial Over Alleged Al-Qaeda Link, AFP Says |
| 2008-06-16 |
| (Bloomberg) -- An Australian accused of receiving money from al-Qaeda and possessing a false passport faces a new trial, two years after his original conviction was quashed, Agence France-Presse reported. Jack Thomas, a former taxi driver in the southern city of Melbourne, was jailed in February 2006 after being convicted of accepting $3,500 and an air ticket home from Pakistan from a senior al-Qaeda operative, the news agency said. Prosecutors alleged he trained at terrorism camps in Afghanistan before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The conviction was overturned and Thomas was freed from prison six months later when an appeal court ruled that an interview carried out by Australian police while he was in custody in Pakistan was inadmissible as evidence. The Victoria state Court of Appeal today ordered a retrial after prosecutors successfully argued that an interview Thomas gave to the Australian Broadcasting Corp. amounted to new evidence. Defense lawyers told the original trial that Thomas accepted the money and plane ticket because he wanted to return to Australia and had no intention of becoming an al-Qaeda operative, according to the report. |
| Posted by:Fred |